Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
I mean, you can, that’s literally the definition of self hosting.
While you’re 100% correct Lemmy would feel pretty slow running on your normal computer unless you keep it online and powered on 24/7. Since Lemmy fetches new content continuously and being offline causes a big backlog which will take time to process. It also presents a few extra challenges since you need a domain and cert and a home static IP isn’t super common which means you need dynamic dns and have to set that up. Any restart where you get a new IP will be even slower since you need your updated A host record to propagate before your Lemmy instance can fetch the backlog. Those issues aside though you could absolutely just run it like any dockerized application on your normal computer.
If your lemmy goes offline- there is a good chance it WONT catch-up.
Servers only retry sending content so many times. ActivityPub PUSHES, rather then pulls mostly.